Introduction

Edna Ferber in Kotzebue, Alaska,
1957. Ms. Ferber made five different research trips to Alaska
during the five-year process of writing Ice Palace. Her
findings richly inform this account of Alaska's
struggles.

Edna Ferber (1885-1968) wrote numerous short stories, plays (some with George
S. Kaufman), and novels such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning So Big,
Showboat, Cimarron, and
Giant. Ice Palace (1958) is her best-selling fictional account
of Alaska's quest for statehood: it is alternately a fascinating travelogue, a popular history of
Seward's folly, and convincing propaganda for Alaska's admission
as the 49th state. A reviewer for the Chicago Sunday
Tribune called it "practically a love letter in fiction form
to Alaska," a "wham dandy of a story" which might even be the
"Uncle Tom's Cabin of Alaska statehood." Ms. Ferber
liked to take a stand in her fiction: her previous novel,
Giant (1953), had narrowed the eyes of Texans in anger,
prompting one Houston critic to suggest ominously that if Ms.
Ferber were ever to set foot in the Lone Star state again, she
should be met with a "necktie party" (rather than the traditional
autograph affair). Alaska, by contrast, gets an extremely
affectionate treatment. Ferber makes frequent plugs for
statehood, at times sounding like a local booster for the
territorial Chamber of commerce. And Ice Palace includes
at least one parting shot at Texas: one character exclaims
"Alaska is two times the size of that little bitty Texas they're
always yawping about." A political cartoonist caught the spirit
of Texas' apprehension:

Ferber--a sentimental and not usually
profound writer--provides vivid representations of human lives, full of
detail and a good deal of practical and psychological knowledge.
Here is her version of how she got started writing Ice
Palace:

Alaska, as a part of the United States, didn't
particularly interest me. I was as ignorant of it as were (and
are) most of the millions of citizens of my country. I knew a
few bare facts only; Alaska was a Territory of the United States;
it was vast enough to be termed, without too much exaggeration, a
sixth continent; it had been bought from Russia for seven million
dollars in 1867 over the protest of most of the citizens of this
country who called the transaction Seward's Folly because the
purchase had been advised by Secretary of State Seward.
Something over seven million had been paid to Russia for this
gigantic territory. Vaguely, it was known that Eskimos lived
there and that in the 1890's gold had been
discovered.1

These few facts, Ferber maintained, were about all the average U. S. citizen knew about Alaska.
The dramatic struggle for
statehood in the 1950s, however, began to penetrate the emotions
of millions "who never had set foot in Alaska, had thought little
if anything about it, and who didn't really know where it was,
exactly." 2

While working on Ice Palace, Ferber kept in close touch
with Ernest Gruening, then Senator-elect of the Alaska Statehood
Delegation. He provided Ferber an insider's perspective on
Alaska's political struggles and his voice resonates in the
voices of the novel's pro-statehood characters--Bridie Ballantyne
and Thor and Christine Storm. When Alaska became the 49th state,
Gruening wrote to Ferber that statehood was a "wonderful
sensation," and that Ice Palace had contributed
substantially" to the victory:

In the last few weeks just about everybody
appears to have read it. Whenever people talked about Alaska--as
scores did, in the closing hours of the fight--they talked about
Ice Palace, and they had gotten the message. How
wonderful that you synchronized it just the way you
did!3

Ferber's timing was indeed fortuitous. Alaskans were grateful,
too. The Anchorage Daily Times acknowledged that "Miss
Ferber has rendered a great service to Alaska through her newest
novel," adding that the book "contains a tremendous boost for the
good qualities of Alaskans and their plea for self-government as
a full-fledged member of the union of states."

Plot

Ice Palace is a vigorous saga set in the mountains
and frontier seaports of contemporary Alaska. Alaska is
depicted as a great natural treasury,
chock-full of "fish and fur and oil and metals and timber," a
place brimming
with life. The book begins with a contemporary scene:

Every third woman you passed on Gold Street in
Baranof was young,
pretty, and pregnant. The men, too, were young, virile, and
pregnant with
purpose. Each, making his or her way along the bustling business
street,
seemed actually to bounce with youth and
vitality.4

Ferber also has an eye for the earlier generations of Alaskans,
however:

Only an occasional sourdough relic dating back to
the gold-rush days of
fifty years ago, wattled and wary as a turkey cock, weaving his
precarious
way in and out of the frisky motor traffic, gave the humming town
a
piquant touch of anachronism.5

The focal point of Ferber's novel is the lovely teenager
Christine Storm, who was born in the slit-open carcass of a caribou in the
middle of a
snowstorm deep in the Alaskan wilderness. Her mother, the
daughter of
Czar Kennedy and a Tacoma lumber heiress, perishes after the
birth.
Christine's father is the son of Thor Storm, a sage giant from
Norway who
came to Alaska as a youth and had struck up an association with
Kennedy.
Czar Kennedy and Thor Storm represent two opposed views of
Alaska's
situation but are linked together by their mutual affection for
their grand-daughter. The
disagreements between the two men are articulated in
the editorial pages of their daily newspapers. Storm's
"Northern Light"
challenges the ultra-conservatism of Kennedy's "Daily Lode," and
campaigns tirelessly for statehood and against absentee
landlordism and profiteering. Christine is brought up by these
two doting
combatants, with the assistance of Bridie Ballantyne, once a
trained nurse but now, in her sixties, the puckish spokesperson and
self-appointed
"greeter" for Baranof.

Czar Kennedy wishes to marry his grand-daughter off to Bayard
Husack,
the rakish son of a Northwest fisheries magnate, in order that
their two
economic empires might together exercise increased control over
Alaska.
With this greater clout, they hope to get young Bayard elected
governor of
Alaska. Kennedy and Husack conspire to bring Bayard to Baranof
with a
very beautiful siren, Dina Drake, who is acting as one of Dave
Husack's
secretaries, and is hoping to capture Bayard, to who she is
reportedly
engaged. If Chris gets jealous enough of Dina's position, the
plan goes,
she might work up some affection for the would-be governor.
Husack
arrives with lobbyists for the exploitative fisheries and a
Seattle salmon-packing concern, as well
as an official for the Department of the Interior.

Ultimately, Chris must choose between Bayard, the cynical young
Seattleite with political prospects, and Ross, a jovial, bronzed
airline pilot
who is part-Eskimo and all-Alaskan. All the major villains are
accounted
for in Ferber's depiction; she is not particularly nuanced in her
portrayal of
character. Indeed, there are only two kinds of people in this
novel: those
who would keep Alaska a territory, represented by Czar Kennedy
and
Dave Husack, and those who perceive its great destiny in the
liberation by
statehood, a cause passionately proclaimed by Thor and Christine
Storm
and Bridie Ballantyne, outspoken rebels against the economic and
political
forces responsible for the decades-long exploitation of Alaska
and its
continued colonial servitude.

The crux of the novel is the continuing struggle between the two
grandfathers for control of Christine's mind and life. The scene
of the
novel involves two locations: Baranof, the mythical composite
city in
central Alaska (based largely on Fairbanks), and Oogruk (based on
Kotzebue), another mythical town in the "bush" area of northwest
Alaska.
There is also one scene set in the United States Senate, in which
a bill for
Alaska Statehood is considered.

The "Ice Palace" for which the novel is named is a fourteen-story
apartment-hotel, housing every modern convenience: super-market,
shops,
restaurant, beauty parlor,--a city under one roof. The palace
also
symbolizes Alaska's situation: those inside the walls of ice can
see out,
while those outside cannot see in. Alaskans, Ferber argues, are
in touch with the modern world; those in the forty-eight states, however,
are ignorant of this fact.

Reviews

Critics tended to agree that Ice Palace made a strong case
for
statehood but lacked in novelistic style and craft. Ernest
Gruening, at the
time of the novel's publication the "Tennessee Plan"
Senator-elect for the
Territory of Alaska, calls Ice Palace the first novel to
deal with
"Alaska as a whole; its character, its drama, its potentials, its
basic
problem, and its people, whom she obviously likes and admires,
and with
whose aspirations she clearly sympathizes."6
It is, he concludes, a novel
with a scope befitting "The Great Land." Elizabeth Janeway,
writing in the
New York Times Book Review, suggests that Ice
Palace is
a "hybrid form in which the fictional element has nearly
succumbed to the
nonfictional." The "local color" of the novel is amusing but the
plot is
"absent-minded to the point of being ramshackle," the "narrative
is
uncompromisingly bald." Ferber's novel' is more of a "movie
script
married to a survey of geography, industry and politics in our
largest
territorial possession."7

A Time reviewer acknowledged that Ferber, like Edmund
Wilson,
had "pencil, pad, and purpose." Her research is evident, as the
book details
everything from parkas and salmon fishing to Gold Rush
prostitutes and
exploitation by Seattle business interests. Newsweek found
her
"plugging of Alaskan statehood" to be "steady, impassioned, and
on the
surface at least, convincing;" the novel, as a whole, was deemed
"sprawling, engaging, but essentially shallow."8 A
reviewer in the Wisconsin Library Journal voiced
contemporary Cold-War concerns: "If a reader stays with the
novel, he will have some ideas of the territory and its proximity
to Russia and the urgency for statehood."9
Surely, the logic went, Alaska would be the first target
in a Soviet push westward.

Ruth Chapin Blackman of
the Christian Science Monitor found the novel "static,"
one in
which--thinking of Kennedy and Storm--"two extremes of outlook
confront each other bleakly and immovably throughout the book."
Chris,
taken to be representative of "Alaska itself," comes through as
an "ordinary
and uncommonly naive young woman." Blackman does, however,
consider Ferber's vivid surface picture of Alaska successful and
grants that
her "concern with values" can give "even a novel of doubtful
achievement
an importance beyond itself." 10
Similar judgements had been made of protest
fiction throughout the century--from The Jungle to
Grapes of
Wrath to Native Son. But these books had announced
important injustices and done perhaps no small part to right the
wrongs
they detailed. The Anchorage Daily Times suggested that
Congressmen, after the 1958 spring recess, would return home to
find "a great number of their lady constituents have just read
Ice Palace and that they have suddenly become tremendously
interested in the book's locale." These lady constituents, the
Times continued, "are apt to have greater faith too, in
Miss Ferber's report than in any alibi a congressman can invent."
The statehood bills would assume a curious urgency, aided by the
fact that "right when the November election comes up, Ice
Palace will doubtless be at the peak of the bestseller lists.
A shrewd politician will not underestimate the power of a lady
novelist."11